Writing of punishments of bygone days, an English rhymester says:
“Each mode has served its turn, and played a part
For good or ill with man; but while the bane
Of drunkenness corrupts the nation’s heart—
Discrediting our age—methinks the reign
Of stocks, at least, were well revived again.”
There is, in truth, a certain fitness in setting in the stocks for drunkenness; a firm confining of the wandering uncertain legs; a fixing in one spot for quiet growing sober, and meditating on the misery of drunkenness, a fitness that with the extreme of publicity removed, or the wantonness of the spectators curbed, perhaps would not be so bad a restraining punishment after all. Some of the greatness and self-control of the later years of Cardinal Wolsey’s life may have come from those hours of mortification and meditation spent in the stocks. And over the stocks might be set “a paper” as of yore, bearing in capital letters the old epitaph found in solemn warning of eternity on many an ancient tombstone but literally applicable in this temporal matter.
“All Ye who see the State of Me
Think of the Glass that Runs for Thee.”
IV
THE PILLORY
Hawthorne says in his immortal Scarlet Letter:
“This scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical or traditionary among us, but was held in the old time to be as effectual in the promotion of good citizenship as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron. There can be no outrage, methinks—against our common nature—whatever be the delinquencies of the individual—no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame.”